Web videos and SEO are catching up to each other at a faster rate than ever before thanks to Vimeo, Viddler and other popular video uploading websites. According to YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost, as much as 20 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube per minute. These numbers translate to approximately 120 decades of video uploaded for a span of one year. Though there’s a lot of competition out there, having a clear and descriptive title with a lot of keywords can help your web videos rank higher than others in search engines.
Since Internet marketing companies prefer to have traffic driven to their site rather than their YouTube page, SEOmoz’s CEO and co-founder Rand Fishkin recommends placing videos on one’s own site and then submitting a video sitemap to search engines in order to have higher ranking results.
Captions on videos also help in SEO because it allows users to search for specific portions in your web videos by phrase. Additionally, since search engines can now easily search and index video transcripts, videos now have a greater chance of higher rankings in search engines. With YouTube, captions are now automatically attached, but human intervention is oftentimes required in order to fix computer-generated mistakes made by the robotic transcription.
New innovations, such as the iPad and Android, are increasingly helping with web video SEO. The trend of web videos diverging from open web to closed platforms can greatly affect the future of SEO in terms of web video marketing. With internet videos starting to catch up with other aspects of SEO and social media marketing, it is safe assume that future web videos may become more accurate and automated in video-text mapping which will help them rank higher in search engines.